VIHO

Home care and elder care impose a number of requirements on supporting technology. The work is complex and consists of many moments of different characters, administrative as well as medical. A supporting IT system in such environment must be well adapted and easy to use in all the different situations the personnel can find them self into.
Today, new technologies facilitate a mobile work in a greater extent. Nevertheless, the work in home health care has always been mobile, but still it lacks well suited, supporting mobile IT systems.

The VIHO project aims at developing the work within the elder care in order to create a more efficient and stimulating work. This is done by a jointly development of work and technology.
When an IT- system is introduced in a work situation, this will result in a number of consequences. Both the organisation and the work practices will experience substantial changes. The work tasks will not be performed in the very same way as before the introduction, since IT-systems by its nature facilitates, supports or sometimes prevents certain ways of working. To create a healthy work and efficient work processes, the organization and the way of working must first be developed, thereafter an IT-system can be design in order to support that future work.

Practical work of envisioning the future work at the workplace was made in what we call Vision seminars (Olssson et.al. 2005) together with a work group from Kortedala home health care organization. Vision seminars are performed in order to envision future possibilities of changes of a work organization as well as practices and are performed as group discussions about present practices, problems, goals, and possibilities. The inherent goal is a more efficient, stimulating and sustainable work. Objectives of the process in the VIHO project were to provide a foundation for a sustainable organization of work, redesign of jobs, and to propose functionality for a future supporting IT system that enhances the workers´ skills.